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About David Futrelle

I run the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, which tracks (and mocks) online misogyny.
My writing has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Salon, Time.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review and Money magazine.
I like cats.

The blogger fosters kittens, so every few weeks she has pictures of different kittens. Also, there’s a beautiful, fluffy resident cat. (Currently, she’s fundraising for the shelter she fosters for, so be warned: lots of posts asking for money. Asking for money by posting kitten pics.)

Speaking of kitties, the one who I’ve been worrying about for the last few weeks is fine. I finally managed to talk to someone in the building he hangs around outside of in the evening and confirm that his people live there, so he’s not abandoned, just super friendly and kind of on the lean side, with people who apparently aren’t home a lot.

I may have already shared this, but I think this is one of my favorites of Hazel (foreground) and Buster (peeking coyly in background). They are sisters I rescued after they were found sleeping in the engine compartment of a friend-of-a-friend’s truck on a cold November morning. I hadn’t planned on adopting any more kitties until after I finished grad school, but my heart melted when I saw this picture of them.

The Goon and Ms Goon are fine human beings. I hand-raised one once, but he was already about 3 weeks old when he arrived. Thumbs up for these two wonderful people and their very, super, wonderful lucky kitty and their supporters.

Anna — img still works similarly, just not on blog comments (in general) — and in this blog’s case, I’m glad, our trolls manage to be so stupid as to require kittens, they don’t need to be able to post any picture they can find hosting for.

The Goon and Ms Goon are fine human beings. I hand-raised one once, but he was already about 3 weeks old when he arrived. Thumbs up for these two wonderful people and their very, super, wonderful lucky kitty and their supporters.

I never owned a cat as a child, but I did train and care for a dog. My mom hated cats to the point that she used to trap strays in cages when they’d wander into our backyard (one of our neighbors was a cat hoarder/stray feeder and there would be like 10-20 of them singing on the fence every night) and then take them to the pound. She used to laugh evilly when she talked about them being put down. It made me cry.

I have always liked the cats that my friends had at their houses, and always enjoyed the idea of an independent pet- one that you can play and pet and snuggle with but who also wants its own space.

So when I got my own place with my husband (who is a seasoned cat person), we decided to adopt a cat, preferably a young adult because we know that they’re far less likely to be adopted and we wanted to know about what size of cat we were going to be homing (we wanted an indoor-only cat because we live near a freeway).

However, the cat we adopted has really changed in personality as we’ve had him for longer. He’s really neurotic and needy, following us around meowing loudly all the time (he’s very vocal) even when he’s been fed, groomed, played with, etc. This wouldn’t be such a big deal but sometimes people have to be sleeping in the apartment (my husband works graveyard, our daughter needs naps, etc) and 99% of the time, the place he wants to be meowing loudly is the room in which a person is trying to sleep, or he’ll stand by the door and bang/scratch the door until he’s let in. He’s also gotten a fair amount bigger- we were told he was about 2 years old when we got him, so we’re pretty sure that’s full grown, but now he’s gotten bigger and longer. He’s all black so I am pretty sure he’s not some kind of wild-animal hybrid but it seems weird that he would still be growing. He’s also got one eye with an iris that is green and partially red in color- we’ve had the vet check it out but she says that it shouldn’t be anything medical- just natural color variance.

I am a huge animal lover, but I’ve never met a cat with a personality like my cat’s. And it’s really irritating to be petting him and then have him suddenly decide to attack my hand, even though his tail/ears are indicating that he’s super happy with the petting. I’ve had to get a special grooming mit to keep myself from getting clawed/bitten when I’m grooming him.

He also “talks”- does this purring mouth moving thing that I have *NEVER* encountered before, and I’ve tried google searching about it to no avail.

Sometimes, he’ll pee on stuff when he gets mad at us- but generally he’s been pretty good about not doing that lately (and yes, I’ve checked, he does not have UTIs and his litter box is cleaned out regularly).

Our apartment only allows one cat and it’s a one-bedroom apartment, so I can’t get another cat (and I would feel uncomfortable having two cats share one litter box, since there’s nowhere to put a second one), and I know that my daughter can sometimes stress him out (she likes to chase him, but she knows how to pet him nicely and she does not pull his tail).

I guess I’m wondering if anyone has any good suggestions for how to help him feel more at ease and less neurotic. It just seems like he’s become more and more whiny about *everything* all the time, and I’m not sure how to help curb his chattiness when our household calls for quiet time so that people can sleep and function.

PS: I do not want to get rid of my cat, and even when he is irritating, I do not “punish” him beyond making the spray air noise (not in his direction, just making the noise in the air because he hates it) if he’s doing something really bad, like sharpening his claws on furniture instead of the five or six cat-scratch things that I have for him. I want to come up with creative, positive ways to help him feel like a happy kitty.

The attacking hands while being petted is just something some cats do when they get overstimulated. My old cat used to grab on to my hand/wrist with his front paws while kicking with his back feet. Apparently it’s a play behavior that simulates hunting, lots of cats do it. Also some cats just have particularly needy personalities, especially rescues. If it is stress related, though, the Feliway might help. Don’t let him know you’re stressed too or yell at him, that will just make him more stressed and the behavior worse.

Also re the biting issue, I found that what was best was to just say “no” calmly and walk away. With my old cat it was kind of too late because I let him bite while playing when he was a kitten and didn’t have teeth yet, so he still did it sometimes even after I started trying to train him no to, but it did decreased. The idea is to try to get them to associate the biting with you stopping an activity that they enjoy, like being petted, so they learn that if they bite then the pleasant activity stops.

@Cassandra- That’s helpful to know about the biting/playing thing. Having never actually had a cat in my house growing up, I’m not sure all that much about cat behavior when it comes down to long-term petting (most cats that I’ve petted at friends’ houses or on the street just love pets pets and more pets without attacking, so it confused me).

I also do use feliway spray but it is a bit expensive, especially since it’s mainly an anti-marking deterrent- he’s still really mouthy and meowy and needy.

He’s also kind of a stomach- *everything* is about food with him, even if he just ate. He gets sick if I leave food out all day for him, so I have to feed him at certain intervals during the day or he’ll gorge himself sick. He is missing one of his claw digits- the shelter said that he was a stray and may have been hit by a car in the past. I think that the purr-talking thing might have something to do with that, but I can’t be sure.

He loves my daughter, though- often he’ll curl up right at her feet while she’s sleeping and glare at anyone who walks by, which is hilarious, since he also enjoys meowing and stomping around at 3 IN THE FREAKING MORNING.

With a lot of cats it seems to be an overstimulation issue, so if you see them start to get a bit antsy, that’s when to stop and walk away, at the first move in a bitey direction.

The more I hear the more this sounds like trauma from whatever happened to him pre-shelter. The gorging could be food anxiety. When I first got my current (rescue) cat she would wolf down food immediately and then freak out if her plate was empty, it took months for her to calm down about that.

Also, yeah. The reason I don’t have more pics of current cat is that she’s a tuxedo and so much harder than my last cat to take photos of. A lot of time you just get a blob with glowing eyes.

He is missing one of his claw digits- the shelter said that he was a stray and may have been hit by a car in the past.

See, that’s interesting. I got my last cat from my sister’s neighbor, and she had this one spot on her back that would make her bite you if you patted her there. Apparently she was injured at some point, and it left her with a kind of permanent tender spot that made her all bitey.

When mine sees other cats outside she yells at me until I come and look, circles around being very dramatic, and generally acts like she’s very upset by my failure to make the other cat go away. It’s hilarious. Not so much when it was a possum that she saw, though, then I was freaked out too.

He’s been blood tested for a bunch of things including thyroid but they said that there was nothing wrong with him blood-wise (we brought him in for tests when he was having urinating-on-the-couch problems and were worried about him). He’s also kind of chunky/pouchy, which doesn’t tend to be the case with hyperthyroid.

Also, it’s not really chattering..it’s more like a prrrip-prrip-prrip sound without any meow in it. Kind of like if you’re rolling your own tongue without using your vocal cords.

I’ll throw in a few thoughts! Even though i’m like a snail here, late to the party (not sure why you’d invite a snail to a party).

The attacking-while-petting is probably cat play behaviour (see the classic “venus hand trap” for a great example) as mentioned. CassandraSays said it best, removing the happytimes might discourage it. Or more happy play times involving string or mices so he’s had his fun for when you want to have petting times (though that might just make him more playful for petting times rather than less, every cat is different).

On other stuffs:

My cat took up the habit of scratching at the front door (and she scratches chairs sometimes too). Loud noises or water (stuff that causes surprise without harming the cat) seem to work to discourage it (though I doubt you’d want to be splashing water all over your apartment). With the water, you don’t need to even splash the cat itself with it, since most are freaked out by water at all times (unless they’re one of those weird cats that likes water).

I try not to actually spray the cat though since that seems a bit mean, but since she freaks out over water even if it’s sprayed like a metre away from her it still has the effect.

Although when I did my animal management course (hah, I could probably help more if my brain wasn’t a sieve :P ), we were always told you have to be a bit careful with that sort of discouraging (adding a negative thing, as opposed to just removing a positive thing as in what CassandraSays.. says) so that the animal doesn’t associate you with the bad thing instead of the action.

With the annoyances at the wrong times, cats tend to just do what they want and don’t understand human schedules (unlike with dogs who can be trained quite well). If they want something, they want it now, and they don’t care that they just made you get up at 3am. You probably can train a cat to be less like that, but it would just be more difficult (and you’d have to start by not giving in to the cat, which is obvious, and hard if it’s being an elephant in the middle of the night and you just want to sleep).

I have similar (though a lot less severe) issues with food with one of my cats (same one again, pesky thing) where sometimes (admittedly, rarely) she’ll just overeat and throw it up all over the floor. I have two cats as well so that compounds the issue, since the other one will either only eat a little of the food you give her or turn her nose up at it entirely, at which point you need to be on the ball to stop the other one scoffing both sets of food. We also try to stick to strict feeding times so we don’t overfeed them, but they still bother us for food whenever the fuck they feel like it.

Overall, kitties are a frustrating pain in the arse. But they’re cute. :P

I do think the popularity of cats on the internet superbly demanstrates how it is women and not men who are truely considered as the “default gender” in Western societies. Cats are associated with women. Dogs are associated with men. And yet it is CATS who beome the nerd super-symbol and representative of the internet.

OK, I laughed so hard that it woke up my cat. She did that for a while when I first got her – first night I had her I actually woke up and went outside because I thought there was a small lost dog wandering around. Took me a while to figure out that it was her.

I do think the popularity of cats on the internet superbly demanstrates how it is women and not men who are truely considered as the “default gender” in Western societies. Cats are associated with women. Dogs are associated with men. And yet it is CATS who beome the nerd super-symbol and representative of the internet.

@Cassandra- I posted a couple pics of him a bit up-thread. He’s all black and has tall ears. He has green eyes (one eye is part-red in the iris, though). He also has some tabby-like stripe markings if you look really close. I think he might be part Abyssinian because of his shape, but he’s also kind of chunky so I can’t really say.

I’d let him outside, but we’re so close to a greenbelt area where there are a good number of skunks and raccoons, plus we’re also close to a highway. To make things worse, our apartment neighbor has this huge tabby male cat who is a HUGE asshole and picks fights with every other cat around. I know it’s horrible because cats love time outside, but if I let him out, there are too many things that I’m worried will hurt or kill him.

I just talked to my parents (I’m away at college, so no cats right now). One cat is enjoying having my sister home from work and the other is spending most of her time sleeping in a box of fabric scraps and bugging my mom whenever she tries to sew.

She also likes to get on my mom’s chest whenever Mom is on the computer, so I do get to see her whenever we Skype.